I am beginning to explore a new strand of research into African intellectual histories of knowledge: how people have asked what makes a claim credible, what gives authority legitimacy, and how reason, experience and inherited tradition are weighed against one another. Two works currently drawing me in are Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah and the Hatäta attributed to the seventeenth-century Ethiopian philosopher Zera Yacob. I am interested not only in the questions these texts pose about history, belief, political life and the grounds on which we judge something to be true, but also in the histories through which such texts themselves become authoritative. The continuing debate over the authorship and authenticity of the Hatäta, for example, opens fascinating questions about manuscripts, canon formation and the recognition - or exclusion - of African thought within histories of knowledge. This is an early-stage enquiry, and I would be very glad to hear from scholars, translators, librarians and others working on these texts, Geʽez intellectual traditions, Ibn Khaldun, or related histories of knowledge.